World News

Egypt had the world's attention in 2005. That year witnessed the country's first ever contested presidential election in September, followed, two months later, by a landmark parliamentary election, in which the banned Muslim Brotherhood group

A Chinese man jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has been released from jail but is severely mentally ill. Yu Dongyue was sentenced to 20 years in jail for throwing paint at a portrait of China's former leader Mao Zedong.

The Prime Minister was under pressure over his support for US "rendition flights", his failure to call openly for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay camp, and over draconian anti-terror laws, after damning reports by the Commons Foreign Affa

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il made a sudden visit to China. Kim's itinerary appeared designed to let him see first hand the success of China's special economic zones. "The rapid changes in the southern part of China have given us unfor

For more than a year, the German government has criticized the US for abducting a German man in Germany, and taken to an prison in Afghanistan, where he was held and tortured for 5 months after being mistaken for a terrorism suspect.
German offici

ITV television news, citing its own sources, said the thieves had got away with more than 40 million pounds when they robbed a depot run by private security firm Securitas in Tonbridge, southeastern England.

Each of us faces choices that will, inevitably, define us. Laleh and Ladan Bijani, cojoined twins who died trying to achieve the fullness that their personal circumstances had denied them. He then slides off into a tangent leaving the reader flat.

Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Manila police are on ``full alert'' after an explosion yesterday at the presidential compound, in anticipation of this week's anniversary of the 1986 revolt that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a police spokesman

About 200 people were believed killed and 1,500 others were missing in the central Philippines when a landslide buried an entire village, with only a few houses left standing after the side of a mountain collapsed. A sea of mud 6 yards deep.

After meeting with farmers disgruntled over confiscation of their land near Beijing, the middleman who engineered the encounter asked if the journalists were satisfied with the interview. If not, he had other stories to offer. "How about underg

Ali Mohaqeq Nasab seems to thrive on controversy. Just a month after being released from prison, he is back at the very activity that landed him in trouble in the first place: editing his Women's Rights magazine.

The president of the Flemish Socialist Party, Johan Vande Lanotte, believes that in 10 years time the number of Belgian troops should be cut from 40,000 to 20,000, with the remaining soldiers integrated into a still-to-be-created European army at a l

Britain's lower chamber of Parliament voted for now to require all citizens who want a passport to have a national identity card as well — a compromise on a measure that originally required all Britons to carry a national ID card. [We'll be b

In the decade since they voted to join the European Union the islanders of the Aland archipelago in the Baltic Sea have been outvoted and overruled by Brussels, time and again. Now they'll teach Brussels a lesson in democracy it may never forget.

A Muslim cultural institute in Germany criticised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for disparaging the Holocaust, daring him to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. "In this place of horror he can again deny the Holocaust, if he has the

Prime Minister Blair held out a begging bowl towards dissenters in his own party, urging them to rethink their opposition towards ID cards and new laws which aim to ban the “glorification” of terrorism.

U.S. missionaries accused by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of espionage have been forced from their remote outposts among jungle tribes by a government order, the final pair leaving Thursday after years of evangelical work.

FURTHER evidence suggesting that British security forces were alerted in advance to the danger posed by the leader of the London suicide bombers emerged. Reports in the United States indicated American law enforcement officers had raised concerns wit

[Interesting account of how well organized is al-Qaida.] An al-Qaida operative sentenced to death for plotting the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 sailors in 2000 was among a group of convicts who escaped from a Yemen prison last week, Interpol said

Protests against Chinese police erupted in the home village of a detained rights activist in Shandong province on Sunday, a week after Premier Wen Jiabao visited the province to promote "harmony" in the countryside.

Cuban officials invited UScorporations to lobby against the US trade embargo and invest in the communist nation's energy sector, as they announced plans to double their drilling capacity and explore for oil in the island's Caribbean waters.

The government is considering weakening laws designed to capture alleged war criminals and torturers who enter Britain. The changes would bar individuals from seeking international warrants for the arrest of people for serious human rights abuses.

The Russian military was facing growing public anger when, amid a flurry of high-profile cases of abuse, a senior officer was convicted of hiring his troops out as slave labour and pocketing the fees. A Russian military court fined him 60,000 roubles

The levies are supposed to be used to help farmers through loans, development projects and a planned return to a minimum price for cocoa beans, which had been in place before liberalization of the cocoa industry in 1999.

Australia needs to reintroduce the draft to address a shortfall in volunteer recruits, the country's former defence chief warned "... Australia should shift to a universal national service structure to train young people for our armed forces

If Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamist movement embodied by Hamas possess a pantheon of heroes, a Sudanese intellectual with a British education will be among them.
Hassan al-Turabi built Africa's first Islamist state when he dominated Su